


Ten E Boom

by Potboy



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 18:45:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10418700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: Peace negotiations between the Resistance and the First Order are uncomfortably personal for all concerned, but especially for Finn, who is torn between both.





	

Finn had been on a hair trigger this morning when the peace talks began. His chair had spikes, his back was just waiting for the knives. Pretty sure – he'd been pretty sure his death would be one of the First Order's conditions, and yeah he wouldn't blame General Organa for agreeing to it – it was just mathematical sense that one life meant nothing in the face of final peace for all. And yeah, if that was how it came down, he guessed he'd be okay with it – trained to die was a lot better than trained to kill. But still--

He'd smiled reassuringly at Rey when she asked him what was wrong, and he'd said “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just don't like, you know. Being in the same room with them.” And he'd jerked his chin the way Han Solo used to, over to the other end of the table where General Hux sat, straight backed and seething like a lightning storm in a satin jacket.

Ren had stood behind him, too special for a chair, probably. Or didn't want to get anything in the way of his saber arm. Or wanted space to pace up and down like a felix in too small a zoo.

Every time he neared the end of the table closest to her, Rey would practically vibrate out of her seat, Jedi training or not. Every time he went the other way General Organa would tense, though she never lost the thread of her speech, queenlike even in distress.

So maybe they'd all been on edge, this morning.

By the afternoon, the room had warmed to sticky humidity – low tech fans barely moving the air, scorched by this moon's blue sun, from over the endless salt flats and into the room. A native insect – six winged, about the size of Finn's hand – kept battering itself against the one closed window in a wall of open ones. The discussions had stalled already, on the question of whether the Resistance could be considered a legitimate government capable of signing any treaty, and Finn's earlier nerves had worn down to a dazed boredom he was not sure was an improvement.

He and Rey had not been asked to talk. General Organa wound down her account of the setting up of the temporary senate and the several acts passed to confirm her as military spokesperson for the Free Republic. A weary silence fell. Rey's head nodded. Finn had forgotten what point they had been discussing, but he was horribly aware that these were not the actual talks – this was merely clearing the way. Ugh. It was like walking through sand – endless labour. Barely any progress. At this rate they would all be here for years.

“Arc 15 ten E downside,” Hux muttered, disgruntled. 

“Ten E boom,” Finn laughed, automatically. 

And suddenly everyone in the room was looking at him. The chair spikes came back with a vengeance. He scrambled upright from his slump, certain that his new friends were now thinking him a traitor. “What?”

“What does that mean?” Rey asked, and she didn't sound like she was mad, but one day his luck or her tolerance would surely run out.

“It's a...” The thought of home rolled over him on a wave of longing. Temperature control. Clean corridors amid glitterbursts of stars. Set times, set routines. Certainty. The kids he'd grown up with, and the things they all understood. The in-jokes, the ribbing. Sharing food and triumphs. 

He knew better than to say this to the Resistance, but the First Order had been his family, and sometimes even now he lay awake and wished for them. To be among people who spoke his language. 

“It's a stormtrooper saying. Arc 15 is a containment failure. Ten E means non-hazardous. It's like you're complaining that you have to waste time fixing a steam vent or um--”

“Blowing hot air?” General Organa asked, smiling.

Finn wasn't familiar with that idiom but he guessed so. He shrugged. “And Ten E boom means at least it hasn't blown up in your face yet. So that's – uh – positive.”

This time, Ren didn't swing back at the end of his circuit. He flung out an arm, knocking Rey's water off the table. The tiny pool barely made a spatter against the hot stone before it flash dried, but there was a brief cool around Finn's ankles nevertheless. “This is pointless! None of us believe talking achieves anything.”

“I do,” General Organa's voice was calm like the calm in the centre of a reactor, where terrible stresses were held in place by even greater restraints. The effect was kind of threatening, and Kylo Ren's shoulders jerked as if he'd been stung. She was looking at him, but his mask was tipped toward the floor.

“You gave up on the Senate about the same time you finally started telling the truth,” he growled. “Ran off to form your own militia. You wouldn't know what to do with peace.”

General Organa's containment field faltered. Her eyes flashed, and the stifling air seemed to buffet Finn from both sides as Leia's energy pushed out like an exploding planet and met Ren's tornado of burnt, bile-like spite. “Ben!”

“General!” Hux cut in. “That name is forbidden. You will respect Ren's allegiance and identity or these talks are over now.”

In the heat, Hux had taken off his gloves. His fingers occasionally strayed to his collar as if it choked him, and his face had gone an unhealthy shade of crimson that clashed with his hair. The sight of it gave Finn a similar giddy joy to the joy he'd felt dumping Captain Phasma in the trash. The gods were falling out of the sky left and right. Even Hux was human, it seemed. A strange, undermining thought.

Leia's mouth twitched as if to snarl. Rey was now on the edge of her seat, and the room was striving to contain three Force-presences like jostling galaxies. Finn's own inclination was to hide, to pretend to be invisible, but he wasn't going to do that any more, so he mastered his flinch and held steady. Hux – the only non-force sensitive present – continued to stare mildly at Leia as though he couldn't feel the titanic pressure at all. But even he couldn't be that insensible.

“In that case, I demand the same for Finn,” Leia said, eventually.

He wasn't used to being seen. Helmet off, all the responsibilities of his own face and his own decisions roosting on his shoulders. There was a freedom in making his own choices, but there had been a freedom too in not having to.

Hux's gaze seemed to burn his face like a plasma cutter. “Your call-sign is Finn?”

“My name is Finn.”

“What's the difference?”

Finn found himself chuckling. It was three quarters bravado and one quarter bemusement because he wasn't quite sure himself. All the Resistance members he'd met so far had a strong emotional attachment to the idea of a name. He'd tried at first to explain to Poe how much it had meant to him to be given a call sign, to be accepted so easily into a new squad when his own had held him at arm's length all his life, but the conversation had gotten complicated and upsetting for all involved. “It's to do with family,” he guessed.

“We are your family.”

“Kriff that!” Rey was on her feet, dark and radiant. “You stole him from his family. You stole his chance to have a normal childhood--”

“Normal!” In the absence of another glass to throw, Kylo Ren punched his own thigh. “Do you see one person in this room who had a 'normal' childhood? What the fuck does that even mean?”

“And in fact you were adopted legally from a Republic orphanage in the Outer Rim,” Hux carried on, with his own version of the eerie calm. His was focussed like a cutting tool, laser sharp. Its first incision felt gentle, and though the cut gaped a little in Finn's chest, even after a minute of silence there remained no pain.

“What?” Leia asked, very cold and precise in the quiet.

“I have the records. Please. As though half the children in the New Republic don't grow up on the streets – don't end up as indentured servants, sex slaves and scavengers. We took unwanted children, we fed, clothed, housed and educated them, and we raised them to excellence. I cannot imagine why you expect me to feel guilty about that.”

Rey lowered herself back into her chair, though every line of her still shrieked of protest. Finn could understand that – she had lost her family at an age where she could remember them. She had spent years waiting for them to come back, fantasizing rescues and happy endings that never came. Hoping for… his imagination failed. Hoping for whatever it was that 'normal' families did for one another.

But Finn didn't have a memory before the barracks. The squadmates, the simulations carefully graded by their age, the under-the-table haggling over spare food and toothbrushes – these things had been fun at times. The whole experience could have been fun, if not for the constant, pervasive sense of fear, of being watched and weighed. And the disappearances. The way low-scoring cadets were warned and warned, and then he'd wake up some mornings to find them gone, and nothing ever said about them again.

Prevailing theory among the kids was that losers ended up composted to feed the vats of yeast that formed the ship's staple food supply. There'd been a song, in fact. How'd it gone? Something, something, you'll be in the tanks.

“And speaking of stormtroopers, this might be the point to say--”

Oh, Finn put out a hand and groped for Rey's hand, as if she could hold him back from a great fall. Here it came.

“As a condition of peace, we want Finn back in the Order.”  
Not dead? Yet his chest clenched and a cold prickle of terror raced up his spine anyway, paralysing his lungs. He couldn't force himself to breathe, and even when he unfroze he could only sip the air in in shallow unsatisfying gasps. Rey's hand tightened on the small bones of his hand until they bowed in and threatened to break.

No. It hadn't been all that bad, but no. He couldn't go back. They'd kill him – even if they said they wouldn't. They'd… 

“That's not acceptable,” General Organa snapped. “Finn is one of ours now, and we don't give up our people to torture and death, whatever we might gain in return.”

“Of course you don't. Not when you actually fucking care,” a flare of blue-white light leaped from Ren's mask like force lightning when he spun to face her.

“Oh,” Leia's strained calm snapped again, “You're a fine one to try to claim some kind of moral high ground. Shall I tell you who really--”

“Why do you want Finn back?” Sensing an open wound, or perhaps just determined to foil Kylo Ren's latest outburst, Rey interrupted. Leia shivered and composed herself. Ren clumped back to stand behind Hux's chair. “Wouldn't he be a destabilizing influence?”

Hux folded his arms. Finn could sense him thinking, like someone shuffling through small stones, but each thought was opaque in itself, and all he could read was considered truthfulness. “Not after reconditioning.”

“Hell no,” Rey exclaimed, sounding so much like Poe that it wrung a smile out of Finn even while his legs were involuntarily trembling. “You're not brainwiping him. That's no better than death.”

“The Empire wiped their droids every month,” General Organa's irrepressible temper was beginning to remind Finn of Kylo Ren's pacing, the way it see-sawed to and fro. “I should have expected Imperial bastards like you to escalate to wiping your people too.”

Hux's nose twitched with something – anger, a bitten back insult – and the ends of his mouth turned imperceptibly down. “One of my earliest memories,” he said, “is of one of your Rebel X-wings gunning down my mother in the courtyard of a school. So don't let's start getting into personal insults unless you want to call this off right now.”

“Listen, I took down Palpatine, son. I'm not afraid of little punks like you.”

Finn wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve and drew in an achy deep breath. This was going bad and it was his fault. It was up to him to get it back on track.

“Would it take my memories?”

“Finn, you can't!” Rey tugged his hand, and the eyeless stare of Ren's mask met him across the table as it once had across a battlefield. Again he felt sick with fear, unmoored, and in that unmooring made free.

“Not at all. It merely clarifies your sense of purpose and belonging. I've been through it myself a number of times. It's...” That was an actual smile, millimetres high, “a little disorientating at the start, but afterwards cleansing. You feel refreshed.”

Finn had spent his whole life in the First Order and still broken away the first time he was deployed. The Force had been with him, and the Force would be with him again. Now that he had experienced confidence, freedom of thought and expression, he couldn't see any merely chemical procedure holding him for long. 

It gave him the cold creeps to think of going back, but someone had to give in for the sake of his sibs – for the sake of all the other stormtroopers in the First Order, for whom this was the best chance of a future where they wouldn't have to be weapons.

“You reconditioned yourself?” General Organa asked, sounding half intrigued and half revolted. “You deliberately chose not to have human emotions?”

Hux turned his hands up as though offering a gift. The gesture brought his palms into the light, both striped with ropy pink scars beneath his nails. “After the destruction of the Hosnian system and the failure of Starkiller, many of our officer corps suffered severe psychological repercussions – guilt, depression, etc. High Command ordered a round of reconditioning for all.”

Leia hissed. Her rage hit Finn like a cold current in an icy sea. “So you just wiped away the deaths of all those people? You should have suffered the consequences for the rest of your life, until it broke you. And instead you just took a drug and claimed you were over it?”

Scuttlebutt among the troopers was that Hux was not hard to work for, nor wasteful with his troops. Tough but fair. But the expression in those flame-blue eyes as he considered Leia was thoughtfully, deliberately cruel, as though he was poking at everything she held dear to see what hurt the most.

“My father was a great admirer of the Jedi,” he said. “The way they could let go of trauma. They could wade through gore and emerge untouched, because they could release their negative emotions into the Force. Reconditioning was a way to make that cleansing available to the rest of us. We are, very much, what your example has made us.”

Oddly, it was to Kylo Ren that Leia looked then, a more complicated look than Finn would have expected for the murderer of her husband. “This is what you choose to ally yourself with? How could you possibly convince yourself that this--”

Being between them was like being torn apart by the gravity of binary stars, and regardless of how much Finn wanted to believe Ren deserved every bit of his pain, he still hated to see it. Empathy – it was the thing that had freed him first time around. The thing that would keep him himself. 

“I'll do it.”

“Finn!” Rey objected again, holding on tight to his bruised hand, unwilling to let him go. She looked stricken, which meant she had already understood in her heart that this was going to happen.

“Who else is there,” he smiled at her, glad she would be watching from the outside, making sure he didn't just disappear, “to speak for the other Stormtroopers?” He had run and found his courage, and perhaps it now was time to turn around and share what he had learned with his sibs. “The First Order isn't wrong in thinking I've got a responsibility for my squad. If it means peace for us all, I've got to try.”


End file.
